England's Ashes-winning Charlotte Edwards back on top of the world

For Charlotte Edwards, the trailblazer anointed as England’s Ashes-winning
captain over Australia for a fourth time, women’s cricket is a more
enlightened province than when she first brandished a bat in anger.

She recalls with a shudder how, upon her Test debut against New Zealand in 1996, she had to wear the daintiest and most impractical of skirts.

"Can you imagine? It was terrible,” she says, preferring to leave the finer details of the look to the imagination. “At least there is a little more professionalism now. Everything has changed beyond recognition.”

At 33, Edwards has joined that rare breed of sportswoman to have scaled the sunlit uplands of her profession and stayed there.

She sits on an MCC committee, claims an MBE as part of her burgeoning swag of silverware, and today luxuriates in the most exquisite satisfaction of reclaiming the women’s Ashes.

Fresh from securing an emphatic series victory, she reflects: “It is probably the proudest moment of my career, even more so than winning the World Cup in 2009. Australia are the No 1 team in the world and they had taken away our crown. Not only did we set the record straight, we played the cricket we knew we could. It is a wonderful feeling.”

Through the haze of euphoria, anxieties are still attached to women’s cricket in this country, where just 25,000 played it in any form over the past year as opposed to the 230,000 clamouring to kick a football. But Edwards, through her deep-rooted and self-evident passion, has become emblematic of a telling shift in the sport’s profile this summer. Granted, the England side have profited hugely from the recent double-headers with the men’s team at Southampton and Chester-le-Street, but in the first Twenty20 contest at Chelmsford 5,000 punters filled the County Ground to watch them alone.

“We have been overwhelmed by the support we have had. Ten years ago you would never have attracted that number to a standalone women’s game. You would have been lucky to bring in 300.”

A phlegmatic character who maintains that she is always fixed on the next target, Edwards is making sure that she savours this latest episode of glory. After vanquishing Australia by seven wickets on Saturday, she and her delirious team-mates headed straight off to throw a hen-party for off-spinner Danni Hazell. This, she acknowledges, was a study in abstemiousness compared to the revelries that ensued after the Ashes-sealing triumph at the Ageas Bowl.

“We let our hair down on the way back to Gatwick Airport,” she says. “We called it the ‘party bus’.”

Under Edwards, England would be careful never to take the carousal to excess. When she and her charges shared the open-top bus parade with a hog-whimperingly inebriated Freddie Flintoff in 2005, they resisted any temptation to follow his lead. So they were all models of decorum? “Oh, I don’t know about that. But we weren’t quite that drunk.”

When Edwards won a record 142nd one-day international cap in Colombo in 2010, Clare Connor, whom she replaced as England captain, heralded her as a “credit to women’s cricket globally, a superb role model for girls who aspire to play for their country”.

It is easy to see why, given how steadfastly she has cleaved to her life’s vocation from the age of 11. It helped that she had a father and an elder brother who both played for Cambridgeshire, but from there she has made her work her own. “I watched my father play every week, and I know I wouldn’t have achieved what I have otherwise,” she explains. “We’re very lucky now, though, that girls don’t have to rely on their background to get into cricket.

“The opportunities, whether in terms of one-or-one coaching or the ability to compete in all-girl cricket in schools, are so much greater.” A family visit to England’s victory over India during the 1993 World Cup would decree her fate.

“We all ran on to the pitch afterwards,” she remembers. “I knew in that moment that I wanted to play cricket for a living.”

Alternative paths threatened to entice her, not least a sideline in tennis inspired by her idolising of Steffi Graf. “It was that awesome rivalry with Martina Navratilova that did it. But I knew 100 per cent that cricket was my main goal. I didn’t enjoy tennis as much, for the simple reason that I didn’t like being on my own. I craved being part of a team.”

Her subsequent surge to prominence, sparked by a remarkable 12 centuries for England before she had even turned 18, has coincided with an extraordinary evolution of the sport she loves.

“Twenty years, the cricket world was not what it was,” she says. “In every match I felt as if I was being judged. They were the hardest days for me as a cricket, what spurred me on to succeed. I created quite a thick skin around me. I felt as though I could deal with anything.” And of the future? Can the Edwards effect last until she is 40? “I haven’t put any time limit on it,” she replies, firmly. “I wouldn’t be doing this if I wasn’t still consumed by the passion.”